The Library of Congress Classification (LCC) is unusual among the general schemes in that it was originally a scheme intended for a single library, with no expectation that it would ever be used in any others. Today it is one of the two dominant classification schemes, certainly in the Western world (the other being the Dewey Decimal Classification). It's a popular choice for academic libraries, particularly university libraries, but also for specialist collections in some subjects. It is also used in one British public library (Edinburgh), but is more common in public libraries in the United States.

Undoubtedly the management advantages of using LCC have influenced modern libraries. The free availability of records on the Library of Congress catalogue, and big union catalogues which include LCC records (such as COPAC in the UK), as well as the excellent bibliographic services offered by the Library of Congress, are very attractive at a time when most libraries regard copy cataloguing as the norm, and do little original cataloguing work.

History of the Library of Congress Classification

The Library of Congress itself was founded by order of Congress in January 1802, by ‘An Act concerning the Library for the Use of both Houses of Congress’. This provided for a room for the collection of 740 books (which had been purchased by Senator Samuel Dexter in the previous year), the establishment of rules for the use of the Library, and the appointment of the first librarian, John Beckley. In April 1802 he was able to issue the first catalogue, in which the shelf arrangement is recorded: this was by size.

In 1812 a subject approach was applied for the first time, the classification used being that of the Library Company of Philadelphia, an independent research library. This classification was based on an adaptation of Bacon's system used in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert. The Library of Congress used only 18 of Philadelphia's 31 main classes, and within each class the books were subdivided by size and arranged alphabetically.

In 1814 the Capitol, including the Library of Congress, was burned by the British, and most of the collection was lost. Thomas Jefferson offered to sell Congress his own library, which was organized by his own system of 44 main classes, again based on Bacon/d'Alembert.